COLUMBUS, Ohio –
Two Defense Logistics Agency Land and Maritime associates have indirectly developed a few ways to save the agency some money.
DLA Demand Supply Chain Analyst Christopher Rodriguez and DLA Maritime Customer Relations Customer Account Specialist Jeffrey Day have collaborated on quite a few projects in their two-year tenure in the Pathways to Career Excellence Program at DLA Land and Maritime in Columbus, Ohio.
Both Rodriguez and Day began their careers at DLA working for the DLA Police Department until they were selected for the PaCE program in August 2017. They quickly began making strides towards process improvement within the order fulfillment community. Rodriguez began improving the Microsoft Excel based CAS Workload Tracker and in his free time he assisted Day with the creation of the CAS and Order Fulfillment SharePoint Website.
“The new CAS Workload Tracker has proven to be invaluable to the CAS community,” said Michael Swiggum, supervisory customer relationship specialist. “The tracker offers a wide variety of excellent time saving features. The one feature that stands out among the rest is the ability to send sales order text item notes directly from the tracker to SAP. This text note feature has already helped the CAS community save countless amounts of time with the text note upload capability.”
The CAS would have to open each sales order and note each one individually using copy and paste. Now Rodriguez’s tracker tool allows the CAS to click one-time and update several sales orders all at once.
DLA Land Customer Operations Industrial Account Specialist David Martin said he was able to note several stock sales orders and it only took about 10 seconds. Saving time is saving money.
Along with this new tracker, the Land and Maritime Order Fulfillment community has also received a new repository type SharePoint website.
The site offers the community an easy to navigate interface with the forum for online discussion, policies, organizational charts, point of contact listings and the most up to date order fulfillment job aids available.
This site is saving the CAS community countless amounts of time having to seek out otherwise hard to find job aids and policies.
“The new CAS SharePoint has made locating job aids and policies simple,” said DLA Land Customer Operations Customer Account Specialist Karina Turgeon. “The interface is user friendly, and I don’t have to click through a bunch of folders to find what I need.”
The SharePoint also provides calendar events, notable CAS achievements and any updates pushed out by upper management.
“The CAS SharePoint is truly an asset to the order fulfillment community and it provides a one-stop-shop for anything, and everything order fulfillment related,” Swiggum said. “Overall, Rodriguez and Day have made outstanding advancements for the Land and Maritime order fulfillment disciplines and they have saved the agency a fair amount of time and money with their efforts. The development of these tools has made waves within Land and Maritime. Rodriguez’s tracker tool has continued its momentum with its recent roll-out to Maritime.”
“I know that the easier it’s for the CAS community to manage their workloads, the better support they can provide to the warfighter,” said Rodriguez in response to a question about what prompted his initiative to create such a worthwhile tool.
As far as Day and the SharePoint site, it has recently been pitched to the Command Culture Council as a potential template for other disciplines within Land and Maritime. The project would assist with records management and transparency among the different job areas in Land and Maritime by providing a standard format that is easy to understand and navigate.
“The SharePoint was created to give users a simple one-click solution to get the most up to date information available,” Day said. “The more information readily available to order fulfillment, the more likely the customer is to get the best support possible.”
If you would like to contact Rodriguez or Day to talk about either of these projects, they are happy to answer any questions that you may have.